Hacker Musings and OCD

vt100 development

With the exception of the web browser, every single piece of my job could be accomplished with a vt100.

I don’t want to go into too many details, but suffice it to say that we are running on a very specific platform, with extremely specific hardware and software requirements. Historically, developers were not provided with machines that could easily run lots of local VMs, preferring instead to build a server farm that resembled production and eventually parcelling out VMs to devs from that. There are also other reasons to eschew the “just run it all in Vagrant+Virtualbox” mode, involving database resources and other considerations.

I discuss (and overshare!) this here, if you’re curious. At the time – for the first year and change I have worked at $SALT_MINE, I’ve been strugging with this mode of remote mounts, sync, SFTP, etc.

In short, it sucks. I have managed to get a couple of Vim configs that work, and now I run basically 2 programs: iTerm 2 and a web browser.

All that hardware – we get nearly top-of-the-line Macbooks – is used to run 2 programs. I could do my job on a vt100, and I hate that.

As I’ve said elsewhere, this has almost always been the case, too! At $LASTJOB the core work required an actual goddamn computer, you couldn’t even use a VM (don’t ask, it was complicated). At the job before that, there was no reasonable way to run one of our products on anything but a real computer of a very specific make, model, and OS (although in fairness that involved licenses as much as bytes).

Every now and then I look at companies like JetBrains and wonder, who actually gets to use those tools? Who gets to do, I dunno, some sort of Java or .NET dev with a fancy IDE that pushes to the cloud, or something? Who gets to use fancy database admin tools? We have to hide our production DBs behind 100 layers of security (a very fancy logging proxy, among other things).

I have managed to get a working Linux config that does the same thing without any distractions: it’s just OpenBox and Terminator. There’s not much else. I’m missing a few nice tools – LaunchBar and TextExpander are the most strongly felt, but I’m sure there’s replacements.

I’m still using a glorified vt100 to this day. I hate it. Is this all there is?